“Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country through the process known as “chain migration” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an UNLIMITED relatives to the U.S. In the next 20 years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import 15 million new foreign-born voters. Between 7 and 8 million of those foreign-born will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.” JOHN BINDER

By
Fred Mazelis
28 January 2016

Opening statements and testimony began this week in the
long-awaited trial of New York City police officer Peter Liang for the
killing of Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old African-American man
walking down the stairs in his apartment building, part of the Louis H.
Pink housing projects in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Jury
selection in the case was completed last week.
Gurley died more
than 14 months ago, on November 20, 2014, as two cops were making a
“vertical patrol,” checking the stairwells in the high-rise building. As
Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Marc Fliedner put it, opening the
prosecution’s case, “Akai Gurley is dead today because he crossed paths
with Peter Liang.”
Liang was indicted by a Brooklyn grand jury on
manslaughter and other charges last February, and both prosecution and
defense agree on the immediate events that led to Gurley’s death.
Liang
and his partner, Shaun Landau, were patrolling in the housing project
when Landau reportedly heard the sound of footsteps. They were on the
eighth floor at the time. Meanwhile, Gurley and his girlfriend, Melissa
Butler, had decided to walk down from the seventh floor after the
elevator never showed up, a common occurrence in public housing. They
descended an unlit staircase, another product of the wanton neglect of
basic maintenance in the projects.
Liang opened the door from the
flight above, raised his flashlight with one hand and drew his pistol
with the other. He fired his gun immediately, and then returned to his
partner, saying it had been an accident and that he would now be fired.
The
two men, instead of checking on whether anyone had been injured, argued
for two minutes over whether their supervisor should be called, as
stipulated in police rules, and which of them should do it. Meanwhile,
Gurley started running. Then, staggering and in increasing difficulty,
he collapsed on the fifth floor. Butler saw that he had been shot and
tried desperately to get help by knocking on nearby doors.
After
apparently not resolving the argument of which of them should call their
supervisor, (reports after the killing indicated that Liang had instead
texted his representative in the police union), the officers made their
way down the stairs, came across the mortally wounded Gurley and his
crying friend Butler on the fifth floor, and did nothing, even though
they are required to perform CPR when needed.
In testimony on the
first day of the trial, a neighbor, Melissa Lopez, said that she had
called 911 after Ms. Butler rang her bell. “I saw her standing there,
crying, asking for help, her hands all bloody,” Lopez said, according to
the account in the New York Times. When she went out to the stairwell, she saw the police officers. Asked what they did, she replied, “Nothing.”
The
police did not summon an ambulance. “The cops shot him, the cops shot
him,” Ms. Lopez said in her call for emergency assistance, recorded and
played in court. “There’s like a million cops, but no ambulance.”
After
having seen the victim, Liang finally called his superior. During this
whole period, Landau and Liang behaved as though Gurley was “collateral
damage,” an unfortunate casualty in the job of policing the poor
neighborhood.
The prosecution charges that the officer’s behavior
makes him guilty of second-degree manslaughter, involving recklessness
rather than intent to kill. He also faces official misconduct, reckless
endangerment and other charges. A manslaughter conviction could bring a
sentence of 5 to 15 years in prison.
Officer Landau is expected to
testify under an immunity agreement. The prosecution’s outline of the
case indicates that, although Landau was not the shooter, he also
refused to provide any aid to the dying man.
The indictment of
Liang is a rare occurrence. One recent report indicated that 54 police
officers faced criminal charges in the past decade, out of the thousands
of police killings, many of them involving unarmed and innocent or
mentally disturbed individuals, that took place over this period.
Convictions in cases like these are even more uncommon.
Liang’s
lawyer indicated that the police officer would probably take the stand
in his own defense. The strategy will apparently be to present him as a
virtual innocent himself, a young officer trying his best and ensnared
in what his defense attorney claimed was “a million-to-one possibility,”
as his bullet ricocheted off the wall and struck Gurley. The attorney
added that the case was “not a referendum on policing in the United
States.”
The cop is clearly guilty of violating specific rules on
the holding and use of guns, breaching regulations in failing to notify
his supervisor for 20 minutes, and, above all, refusing to provide first
aid.
These actions did not take place in a vacuum. The police are
sent into the city’s housing projects to carry out “broken windows”
policing, initiated under the current police commissioner, William
Bratton, during his first stint on the job more than 20 years ago. The
cops function as a virtual occupation force, making threats and arrests
for such charges as loitering and trespass, even in one’s own building,
and minor drug charges that would barely raise an eyebrow in wealthier
parts of the city.
The trial in the Akai Gurley case has been
delayed for nearly a year, likely to allow anger to cool. His killing
came within weeks of the exoneration of the police in the murder of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the chokehold death of Eric
Garner in Staten Island that past summer. Only two days later,
12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a Cleveland cop. The
killing of Akai Gurley, unlike these cases, was accidental, but it was
an “accident” that reflects the police-state atmosphere in working class
and poorer sections of the city.